How about getting rid of the term "Eastern Europe" if the aim is to enlighten Western audiences? Bohemia lies in the very centre of Europe. It has always been considered a prototypically central European country, like Austria or Germany. It's incorporation into the Soviet empire after WW2 was an accident of history which was rectified in 1989 and again in 2004. Ditto for Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.

Referring to these countries as Eastern Europe now, quarter of a century following the collapse of Communism in Europe and almost a decade since their accession to the European Union, is equally offensive as referring to Vietnam as 'French Indochina' or to Tanzania as 'German East Africa'.

Marx and Engels came up the first with the idea of eliminating 'primitive nations' because they were considered unfit for the revolution and therefore had to be wiped out. See their articles in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 1848-1849. Communism and fascism were simply variations of the same basic ideas.

Well, they kick off with the German army dispatching Lenin in a sealed train to Sweden, thence to Petrograd, as a general introduction to the role played by secret services in the shaping of history and inevitably causing an awful lot of serious trouble (worse than an A bomb, as the late Prof Wieczorkiewicz said). Dr Jan Bury, the younger one on the right, said logistics were far more important, but publicist Ziemkiewicz (left) and more importantly Wieczorkiewicz (older one on right) argue the meddling of secret services has huge effects, though not those the services originally intended. E.g. with Russia out of WWI, Germany was a hair's breath of winning it, or at least taking Paris, but ultimately paid the price of secret collaboration by getting its own army infected with Bolshevism. And of course not only the Germans were meddling. Apparently Woodrow Wilson was at the time also smuggling Bolsheviks into Russia. Wieczorkiewicz stresses that all Western liberals detested the Russian tsars (admittedly, by then a ridiculous anachronism), so much so, that when after the February Revolution, the provisional government wanted to hand Tsar Nicholas over to the UK of his cousins, Lloyd George refused. He adds that Kerensky's entire provisional government had belonged to international masonic lodges, and that in 1914 the Bolshevik party was secretly funded by Russian bankers. I.e. everyone was in on the game, though the chances of proving it are nil, since such important deals are hardly documented. And what is documented in Russia, remains secret for centuries - the examples given are docs concerning Poland's November (1830) and January (1863-4) uprisings. And even of the official Lenin documents (52 vols) another 52 volumes are censored, for pretty obvious reasons, because Lenin viscerally hated Russians, frequently referring to them with various epithets. Isn't that so true, national leaders who hate their nation? I could name a few more. And of course the West persisted in viewing Lenin as someone in the 18th-19th-century western socialist tradition not the Asiatic mass murderer he really was, at least up until the cold war period, though we may argue it persists to this day. Pity Wieczorkiewicz is no long with us, a very interesting and provocative historian. Jozef Mackiewicz is probably also worth a read.

"Fascination" with Marxism is in its third century and that any intellectual of sound mind and honest heart could have been fooled by it in the 1950s beggar's belief, let alone aspiring historians of the 21st, especially if they happen to be the wife of Timothy Snyder. Admittedly, like a particularly virulent virus, it constantly mutates, but all its mutations, not just Nazism, are inevitably repulsive, nihilistic and significantly anti-Christian. And I don't know what needs to be explained to outsiders. Over the centuries it's left corpses on every continent, including Western Europe, with perhaps only the exception of North America (i.e. to the north of Mexico) and Oceania, though I might be wrong.

I'd love for humanity to move on, and perhaps leave such intellectuals to soul search and navel gaze on an island in the middle of the Pacific. But that's just wishful thinking. Intelligent people don't hold such views because they are hopelessly naive or crazy. No, deep inside they are eternal opportunists. There is always a demand for agents, stooges or just useful idiots, and useful idiots have a great sense of job security.

As for totalitarianism, historically that was indeed an important feature of communism, but it could never be that total. In fact, in many respects (though not of course in terms of political activism) people were freer then than they are today - and who in Poland today would declare they support the main opposition party at work? Rote learning had nothing to do with totalitarianism, it was just an old-fashioned teaching method, one of many, and not necessarily the very worst. At least back then there was a clearer sense of right and wrong, and a greater sense of solidarity, us and them. Today perhaps the worst legacy of externally imposted Marxism is an ever greater amoral sense of nothingness.

Good point, I suppose it kind of happened in June 1941, but those "reform-minded" dissidents tagged on when in Eastern Europe the Stalinist reform was already under way in earnest and had eliminated Polish "fascists" such as Witold Pilecki and Emil Fieldorf, while the bad "old left", like Piłsudski and Ciołkosz, were either long dead or had emigrated. Other than that, and the fact those same "dissidents" are again the country's over-privileged elite, I'm sure the book reads like a romance.

I should explain. By people being freer back then, I mean Poland in the 1980s (from my personal experiences), but certainly not the Stalinist period of the 1950s, when anyone could disappear in the middle of the night.

Lingering communism and its "reaction to fascism", last week prime minister Tusk got it in one, in a characteristic "that's how Hitler started" allusion. Earlier a bunch of masked Warsaw University students staged a demonstration, jumping up and down outside a lecture hall where government connected arch lefty feminist church basher Prof. Magdalena Środa was guest speaker (not against her right to speak but against the fact that university authorities have started banning speakers from the conservative right - because they are too political)and therefore the entire post-communist mainstream media were up in arms. Donald Tusk could not but respond. He claimed he immediately though of the "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" scene in Bob Fosee's Cabaret.

It has nothing to do with economy (after all, Polish, Czech and Slovak economies are doing better than many of the "Western European" ones).
North America is called North America because it is the Northern part of the continent. Central Europe should be called Central Europe because it lies in the centre of the continent, which a brief look at the map will confirm (I understand geography might be a difficult concept to master for some of our Anglo-American friends, but I trust they can do it).
Our problem with the term is that it was coined during the Cold War to refer to the Communist part of the continent, without regard to geography or culture. Well, the Cold War is long over, so unless you want to perpetuate the old "us versus them" mentality of stigmatising the "weird other", you'll re-adjust to the new reality. Or you might just as well call Germany "the Third Reich" and refer to Mexico as "New Spain".

I cannot help but wonder why is the author using the term 'fascination' ? Fascination of the present generation of aspiring 'historians' with communism, its mass crimes and its post WWII leaders ? Surely any thinking historian would know that neither Stalin himself, nor any communist leaders (selected by Stalin) of post WWII satellite countries, could have ruled without thousands of disciplined and often cruel interrogators, executioners, guards, judges, and other perverts, who implemented their orders at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. It is a fact that, thanks to the former KGB operators now ruling the Kremlin, the Soviet era KGB archives have not been opened to the public. Very few people have been brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD - KGB service. Most people in Russia have never even tried to settle the score with their Stalinist past.

How many aspiring US historians know the name “Genrikh Yagoda,” one of the greatest 20th century murderes, the GPU’s deputy commander and the founder of the NKVD ? Yagoda and his NKVD diligently implemented Stalin’ policies and is responsible for the deaths of millions. After Yagoda established and for years operated the Gulag penal empire, he failed to please Stalin, was demoted and executed, only to be replaced as chief executioner by Yezhov, known as the “bloodthirsty dwarf.” Then came Beria and a score of others, finally Andropov who, it should be recalled, continues to be admired by Vladimir Putin himself.
Fascinating, isn't it ? It's time for all aspiring historians, who want to write about European communism, to open their own eyes and to insist on open access to the still secret Soviet KGB records.

They may well live in the past, but one assumes that they have read couple of books before claiming to be writers, and join TE. Look at the very beginning of the article: "Communism itself was a reaction against fascism and the Depression of the 1930s." LOL!
.
The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848; The Paris Commune happened in 1871; and the communist (Bolshevist) coup d'etat in Russia was staged in 1917. If anything, fascism was a reaction to communism, not the other way around.
.
And as Nazism is concerned, the first National Socialist Party was established in 1898 in Czechoslovakia, and Edvard Beneš was its prominent member. Ever since a loud chorus is always ready to shout down any suggestion that it had anything to do with Nazi ideology... but there are very telling moments in the party's history.

"Communism and fascism were simply variations of the same basic ideas."
As demonstrated by the fact that Stalin and his associates (like Dzerzhinski, Yezhov, Beria, Kaganovich and many others) were rather ahead of Hitler and his partners-in-crime in building and operating concentration camps. Of course, since Hitler had no access to the Siberian wilderness, he had to invent other methods to achieve the same results.

It sounds as if whole Eastern Europe consists of just Poland and Czechoslovakia. What about Belarus, Ukraine and Russia? What about Baltic countries? Also those revolutions that toppled communism may have been peaceful but in some places events that followed it were far from peaceful - think of bloody mess in Chechnya, wars in Pridnestrovie and Abkhazia. And believe me - at least in former Soviet Union there was nothing uplifting about replacement of dysfunctional communism with wild capitalism. It was pretty interesting from outside I guess, those who lived through it perceived it very differently.

Kuzmich, no need to feel sorry for you should have learned by now that no Red Army Day is officially marked in Ukraine despite the undeniable fact that millions of young and not-so-young Ukrainians were drafted into the ranks of the Soviet Red Army and paid with their lives in defending the homeland. You (and other readers) should be aware, however, that Ukraine now officially marks the National Defender's Day that starts with a commemoration of the Battle of Konotop on July 8, 1659 when tens of thousands of Ukrainian Cossaks under Hetman Ivan Hyhovskyj, in alliance with the Polish-Lithuanian forces, defeated 100,000 army sent by the Muscovian Tsar Alexei to invade Ukraine. That defeat of the Russian Tsar produced a decades-long stalemate between Muscovy and the Polish Crown with a practical division of the Moscow-dominated Left Bank and Ukraine's Right Bank under a Polish-Lithuanian sphere of influence. The pattern of division-and-conquest became very familiar as clearly demonstrated by the Moscow Tsar's role in the late 18th and 19th cent. divisions of Poland in alliance with the Prussian and Austrian monarchs. The same pattern was followed by the Sept. 1939 division of Europe by a friendly alliance between Stalin and Hitler.
Its not clear what division-and-conquest plans are included in Putin's strategic plans for the next couple of decades but let's hope he will not be as foolish as Muscov's Tsar Alexei was back in 1659.

1) Czechoslovakia did not exist in 1898. It formed in 1918.
2) The party, Česká strana národně socialistická, had NOTHING to do with the ideology we now call Nazism, which was founded much later by Hitler. It was a mostly left-wing party, and I understand it exists in some moribund condition even today. Hitler's party name was, like most things he created, a ploy to gain more followers (hence the inclusion of national, socialist, and worker's, all buzzwords in the late 1920s/early 1930s).

agree! and remember romania's ceausescu? the "eastern europe" - a generalisation created to proof the weakest of the theories! there is no single event that happen in "eastern europe", no single proces, common culture, tradition, nothing!
the polish/czechoslovakian/german/hungarian stories may not be paralel to balkan ones (is ex-yugoslavia eastern europe for you? - i'm confused). and deep russian taiga may well be a home of very different views then sunny dalmatia...

Well, now that I have actually seen this new book and read it rather quickly, I am amazed how the author could have possibly justified calling it "a rich account' ? A 'fascination' ? Come on, get serious.